“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.” Walter Cronkite

Perhaps Most Gripping Story Yet From Survivor Of Orlando Slaughter

June 14, 2016

There have been too many sad and horrific accounts from the gun slaughter that took place at a gay bar early Sunday morning in Orlando. I felt for sure every nerve had been jolted within until I read this newspaper story.

Joshua McGill, age 26, arrived about 11:45 p.m. He and a friend had come to see their favorite bartender. “The night was great, super authentic Latino music,” he said. They were dancing near the bar by the patio exit, he said, “no drama, everyone was having a good time.”

At last call, around 1:45 a.m., Mr. McGill and his friends started to pay their tab. “Not 10 minutes later we all of a sudden hear three loud bangs. I’d never heard a gunshot before in person,” he said. The group ducked out the patio exit, climbed the patio fence, and he hid in the parking lot.

Mr. McGill saw a man stumbling about, covered in blood. “He clearly had two gunshot wounds,” he said. He later found a third wound in the man’s back.

Mr. McGill took off his shirt and tied it to help stop the bleeding. He helped the man toward police, who had by then cordoned off the club.

A police officer directed Mr. McGill and the injured man to a squad car.

“ ‘I’m going to need you to lay down on your back, put him on top of you. Hold him as tight as you can,’ ” the officer told Mr. McGill.

Mr. McGill said he lay in the back of a squad car and held the man in his arms to keep him stable as they drove the short distance to the hospital.

“Everything was going pretty much in slow motion, so what seemed like five minutes seemed like forever and forever,” Mr. McGill said.